


Giants & Centaurs & Snares... Oh, My!: Being the Sixth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

by LooNEY_DAC



Series: The Coin [6]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 19:43:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17668883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/pseuds/LooNEY_DAC





	1. Wargaming

Sometimes people do things for the weirdest reasons.

Now, I can see why some people enjoy dressing up and recreating an historic battle, but I thought they usually did stuff like that on the anniversary dates of the battle (or as close as can be arranged).

Six months is more or less the farthest possible day from an actual anniversary that I can think of, but here we were, about to trudge through swamps and “attack” a “fort” with whoever it was that they’d roped into playing Andy Jackson leading the way.

The swamps were the only genuine thing about this whole exercise, unless you can prove Andy Jackson’s troops were kitted out in nylon and other such fabrics. While I’ll admit that wool is not the best material for slogging through the swamps, King Cotton got his throne for a reason, and even “better living through chemistry” hasn’t managed to figure out something better (or “not yet”, as one of my aunts with a lot of DuPont stock would say).

We’d come down to Florida specifically for this “special exclusive experience”, which is one of those things that tells me both how much money we actually have and how much money we don’t at one and the same time, because while we have the funds to go on these outings, we have little enough to keep falling for the “exclusive” marketing trick. See, really rich people can arrange “special exclusive experiences” any time they want; they don’t need to “take advantage of this limited engagement” unless it’s something they’re really interested in.

My parents have been trying to pretend to themselves that they only jumped on this trip like a cat on a baby bird because “it’ll be such a wonderful educational experience” for me; while I admit that marching through the swamp gives you a new perspective on stories from history books about forced marches and such, it’s an “educational experience” I’d just as soon have forgone, thank you very much.

On the other hand, we were also around for the artillery bombardment demonstration, and after that I’ve found that I suddenly have much more sympathy for those with “shell shock”.

Of course, the saddest thing about the whole affair is that I did a bit of research into the battle, and it was nothing like these reenactors claim it was: there was no battle per se, because the British snuck away in the dead of the night and blew up the fort that Jackson had been going after. Admittedly, this was after Jackson had caught them totally by surprise by marching out of the swamps and surrounding the place, and Jackson’s whole aim was to deny the British a naval base on the Gulf Coast, so it was definitely a victory.

Looking a little deeper, it was what you might call a typically American victory: we went where our “European betters” thought we couldn’t go and did what they thought we couldn’t do with way fewer men than they would have tried to use, so they were faced with defeat no matter what they did. Other examples include but are not limited to: Scott’s Mexico City campaign in the Mexican-American War (especially cf Wellington’s before and after remarks); the creation of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War; and Washington’s Christmas attack across the Delaware.

Patriotic pride aside, there were probably things I should take a closer look at in how the reenactors decided to stage their version of the battle, but I’ll save that for after I put down what happened after we got back to our nice (and air-conditioned! Oh, the luxury after the stifling Florida heat!) hotel room.

After changing out of my utterly saturated clothes and into something light, dry and made of cotton, I found myself staring at the Coin intently. In the wake of the day’s activities, I needed the relief the mindless pleasure of just watching a coin spin would give me. Yes, I set the Coin down on a carpetless portion of the floor and set it spinning, and the world turned to silver…

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. The Rule of the Behemoths

When the mists cleared, I was looking at the biggest foot I’d ever seen, and from a lot closer than I wanted to be to it.

Now, my parents have dragged me to exhibitions of “modern art” (which usually means “ugly stuff we pretended to layer with meanings you plebes are too thick or uncultured to understand so we can jack up the selling price”), so I’ve seen at least one really huge foot, but they usually end just above the ankle; the leg attached to this one went all the way up, since it was part of one of those giants I’d seen on the Visualization Engine awhile ago.

Well, at least I was going to get the opportunity to use some (hopefully all) of what I’d seen before I needed to start shaving or anything; these trips to the Realm (and environs) are infrequent enough that I was beginning to wonder about that.

First, though, I needed to make sure I didn’t get stepped on, and maybe to try to talk to this giant and see what was up (aside from him). As I mentioned, I was far too close to that gargantuan foot for me to be anything but apprehensive about maybe getting stepped on, so I tried to get a reasonable distance away, which would also give me a better shot at attracting the giant’s notice, since he wouldn’t have to look down so far.

It must have looked kind of like an ant trying to get a human’s attention, only with more silly gestures. They only got sillier as I kept on trying, while the giant kept on looking anywhere but at me.

Eventually, I began to get rather frustrated at my lack of success in catching the giant’s attention. I had seen one of these giants and a human holding some kind of conversation on the Visualization Engine; why was I having so much trouble with this one?

On my belt was a small but powerful flashlight that the reenactors had told me was a standard Army-issue hand blinker, along with a decidedly loud whistle; both had been given to every member of the expedition for emergency use, since the reenactors weren’t keen on having anyone vanish into the swamp on their watch. I decided to see if either of these tools would enable me to bring myself to the giant’s notice.

A moment later, I had my answer: while the whistle went as unremarked as anything else I’d yet tried, the hand blinker finally seemed to have caught the giant’s attention.

Communication was decidedly slow and rather halting; it made me appreciate being able to speak freely with everyone else I had had to interact with in the Realm much more (and it made me desire yet again to slap Jonathan Swift silly, but I’m sure I’m neither the first nor the last there).

I shall call him ‘George’, since I never managed to learn how his real name sounded.

Among the other things that George told me, I learned that the giants were currently fighting a war against a bunch of centaurs, which struck me as rather odd.

The giants had never really cared about the itsy-bitsies (as they called us) beyond incidentals; after all, what would a cave dweller care about ants and termites? Of course, that changed when the centaurs decided to fight.

Now, you might wonder how centaurs, large and strong though they might be to a human of normal size, could ever hope to wage a war against giants as large as these were and come out victorious. So did I, until the centaur attack came.

When I saw the centaur attack force flying over to strike at the giants, I couldn’t help but think of them as a cloud of horseflies come to torment a picnic party.

Those four powerful legs were working mightily to keep the weird contraption aloft, but the centaur had more than enough attention left to keep shooting those weird stingers at any giant within its field of fire.

The leader solemnly walked over to the giant that had been blinded in the attack. A horrible premonition came over me as the leader gently took the sightless head between his hands and crushed it like a melon.

George had a sad but resigned look on his face. “It is our law,” he signaled to me. “When one of ours is crippled, the leader must personally kill him, and as painlessly as can be done.”

Without another word to me, the whole group of giants began to walk away, the headless corpse of their fellow left behind like so much rubbish. The only other thing they left behind was a plain full of footprints that I’d have to negotiate if I wanted to follow them.

You can imagine my surprise when I walked around one of the footprints and right into the middle of a centaur herd…

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. The Centaur Herds

Of course, since I was trying to avoid attracting the centaurs’ attention, I got it immediately, in sharp contrast to my long and mostly futile efforts to be noticed by George. Fortunately, though, the centaurs weren’t hostile, especially after I returned all the appropriate responses to one of their seemingly endless litanies. I did well enough that the Lead Centaur himself came forward to see me, and we spoke without ceremony, though not without a lot of initial confusion on my part.

Imagine the following spoken in a thick Southern drawl: “I salute myself to you! The Centaurs of Haniwitayo are leading. Five stars the blue ribbon gets, but not takers for founding mellifluous and subtle, as warm shoes wanting. Pumpkin Eater slipping through darkness to fore fore four.”

[Editors’ Note: We have put down the Lead Centaur’s speech exactly as written in the notebook, or as close as our tongue can approximate it; our “redoubled translation” of this near-gibberish is as follows: “Salutations! I lead the Centaurs of Haniwitayo. Great performance reaps great rewards, yet none of mine are courageous enough to try being an ambassador to your kind. A messenger has gone out to alert the four scouts about our precarious position.” Deciphering why he felt the need to tell our chronicler all this is a task beyond any and all of us, so this “redoubled translation” is rather useless, as the speech (though not nearly as incomprehensible as it was before) is still utterly confounding to the reasoning of a human. No Centaurs were available for consultation, however, and it may prove that such disclosures are perfectly normal for them.]

That little gem was one of many that I had to try to unscramble on the fly, though the various rituals of politeness aided me in stalling until I had at least a vague notion of what he was actually saying. Fortunately, he didn’t try to trick me into wedding one of the homelier centaur ladies or anything like that.

When we finally reached the centaurs’ main encampment, the chief rather gleefully introduced me to what I can only describe as their weird relatives. If he was hoping to provoke me into some solecism, he failed, as the “weird fever dream” that had presaged my last visit to the Realm had rather raised the bar on what it would take to weird me out, thank you very much.

The camel-centaur was the most laid-back dude I’ve ever met; he spoke like a stereotypical California stoner without two brain cells to rub together--but I got the impression that some not insignificant part of it was a performance meant to trick others into underestimating him, though I couldn’t quite make out how much was put on and how much was true in the limited time that I had to converse with him. His informality stuck out amongst all the “for love of the rite” rituals going on all around him, as did the fact that none of the other centaurs seemed inclined to shun him because of his attitude. This last was probably because they all feared his prowess at expectorating.

The donkey-centaurs and the zebra-centaurs were much closer to normal centaur behavior, though the donkey-centaurs seemed even more touchy about the rites than the chief accompanying me was. Well, at least I wasn’t the one who got their goat (so to speak): a few of them got into a rough-and-tumble brawl with one of the regular centaurs tagging along in our wake; the chief decided he needed to hurry me along to meet some other friends of the centaurs’.

I was expecting more quasi-centaurs; instead, I learned that the Centaurs had allied themselves with a tribe of Satyrs. Or were they really Satyrs? I soon discovered that there were as many different strains of them as there were of the centaurs.

The Satyrs proper were a mix of man and goat; man and deer mixes were called Fauns, and man and sheep mixes were known as Panines. This last would have had me keeled over laughing except that the Panines tend to have very fearsome horns and very fearsome and exceptionally humorless faces to go with them. Their leader bore quite a close to Alamsta’s ram, and I decided that I didn’t care to find out whether they had a similar temperament, as well.

I had no notion at the time how soon I would learn all about how temperamental my hosts and their allies were…

TO BE CONTINUED


	4. Snares and Basses

Before another hour had passed, the whole of the centaurs’ war party was thundering away from the field where they’d downed one of the giants as part of what I later learned had been an extended game of cat-and-mouse with the similarly roving giants, the two sides regularly swapping out which was cat and which was mouse depending on how the occasional skirmishes they fought went. This was all supposed to be building up to The Day of Battle, which I gathered they conceived as their Ragnarok, complete with the destruction of the entire world as a side effect.

Whatever their motivations or beliefs, the centaurs were in motion.

Somehow ‘herd’ seems too small a word to describe that vast mass of centaurs as they swept across the countryside, but ‘swarm’, ‘horde’ or even ‘host’ don’t seem right, either. Such a migration is far beyond my own command even of English, my native tongue, to describe in any adequate way; watching it made me want to learn more and better adjectives so that I could someday come close to describing it. In any case, please just take it as read that it was even more intense in person than seen through the Visualization Engine.

Those guests of the centaurs lacking the speed or stamina to keep up with them were loaded into wagons drawn by bulls with men’s heads; none of the centaurs wanted to acknowledge that the bulls even existed and the bulls themselves never spoke, so I never learned anything about them beyond what their appearance could tell me.

Most of the morning was spent on this ride; very few of the centaurs wanted to hang around the wagons and chat, either, so it was a mostly silent ride, as well. I had quite a bit of time to think on the way, so I mulled over everything I’d observed of the two peculiar groups warring with one another, comparing it all to what I’d been told by each of them. Something wasn’t quite adding up, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was—yet.

An hour or so after the sun hit its peak, we had slowly threaded our way through a thick patch of hills that came just shy of being mountains and were finally emerging into a narrow valley. The hills and the valley were brown and withered, but the slopes opposite us were hale and green, the sight of which perked the centaurs up considerably, even as it filled me with foreboding.

Somehow I knew that just behind those hills lay the Realm; further, I knew that no boundary line on a map would deter either of the parties to this war from taking the war wherever they felt would give them an advantage, whatever the cost might be for the locale or any locals therein. Now I had to find out whether any words I could say would deter them from wreaking their havoc on the Realm.

Of course, even getting a new audience with their leader was a matter of the interminable back and forth of rite and ceremony with layer after layer of the flunkie chain; actually talking about the matter was even more involved. Fortunately, I had seen and heard enough of it all on the Visualization Engine that navigating it was just a matter of going through the motions until I finally gained permission to even bring the matter up.

Oy.

Be that as it may, I started on the task of laying out my case before the centaurs’ leader, but it was as though I was singing opera at a deaf man: none of what I was saying seemed to penetrate. Finally, I dared to ask the leader why he chose not to hear my arguments, but he wasn’t the one who answered me.

A voice I had not heard in the camp before came from behind me. “They have chosen to follow my counsel, and it has brought them to the brink of victory.” I knew those smug and oily tones, whatever the shape of the mouth from which they emerged…

TO BE CONTINUED


	5. Snakes and Drakes

Yes, the voice from behind me belonged to the Magician. Worse, he was no longer in his former human form, but instead had assumed the shape of a dragon; I could only assume that he was therefore just as powerful as a natural born dragon would be, since assuming otherwise might very well be fatal.

The reptilian face bore a smug expression. “All your eloquence has been for nothing, Young Protector: the leader has agreed long since to heed my counsel in matters of the war against the giants, since my people have sworn to be of aid to him in the battle to come.”

I had thought that my heart could sink no lower, but his statement proved me wrong. “Your… people?” I asked carefully.

The Magician nodded, and out from behind his great bulk slithered two more dragons, one on each scaly flank. “A number of the other dragons have asked me to be their intermediary to these noble centaurs so that both groups may prosper.”

Which told me exactly what the dragons really wanted, or what the Magician had persuaded them into wanting. “Meaning that after the big battle, the dragons can have free reign over the Realm, since neither giants nor centaurs have any interest in it and the inhabitants will be gone.”

One of the other dragons sniffed. “As you say, neither the giants, who will have nothing to say in the matter regardless, nor the centaurs with whom we have thrown in our lot care one whit what happens to the battleground after the battle is won, and with it the war.”

The Magician rolled his reptilian eyes at his fellow’s folly in confirming my hypothesis (I’m sure he would have really loved seeing me flail around uncertainly in my attempts to frustrate his designs without being sure of just what they were), but he only said, “As you say, the giants will have nothing to say in the matter. Of course, neither should you, but the rules and customs of the centaurs mandate that you be allowed to speak; I suppose pointing out the futility of the endeavor is as futile as your words will be?”

I declined to dignify the sardonic question with an answer (though Alamsta would have undoubtedly seized the opportunity for some prime snark without hesitation); instead, all my mind was occupied in the monumental task that lay before me: keeping myself from throwing up from the impossibility of what I nevertheless had to get done.

So, just to recapitulate how utterly hopeless the situation I was in was: There was a war between the giants and the centaurs over some relatively petty slight that neither side took as petty in the slightest; they were both nomads and would fight wherever they happened to meet; their current location right outside the Realm had all been part of a convoluted plot to have the giant/centaur war spill over into the Realm so that a bunch of dragons could take it over; and, if that weren’t enough, the head dragon was the Magician, who I was starting to think I should have called “the Cockroach”, because no matter how many times I killed him, either deliberately or accidentally, he just keeps coming back.

Now, remember: my aim was, is and always will be to keep the Realm safe. To do this I would have to convince both the giants and the centaurs to bury the hatchet while also talking the dragons into going away and picking some other nation to subvert, and arguing against me would be someone who utterly hated me and was literally supernaturally persuasive, along with everything else that came with being a dragon.

Never let it be said that I gave up just because the situation was hopeless, or looked to be so. I looked back at the leader, who had been patiently waiting for me to respond…

TO BE CONTINUED


	6. Subtlety

I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, the last thing anyone present expected happened: as though there had been some secret signal, three giants walked out of the hills and into the middle of the mass of centaurs; on the way, they were each very careful to make the correct motions in accordance with the centaurs’ rites and rituals (or as close as they could manage), so they remained unmolested all the way into the presence of the leader. One of them was George, and he had his version of the hand blinker with him.

How about that. George had actually convinced the giants to send a peace mission to the centaurs on the strength of how our conversation had affected his own convictions.

Suddenly my own task didn’t seem nearly so hopeless as it had a moment ago.

Before I began my attempts at diplomacy, however, I had to wait for the giants to complete the “we want an audience with the leader” rituals and then I had to ensure that someone was transmitting the conversation to them faithfully via a hand blinker; the translator turned out to be the camel-centaur, who bore a new air of animation at the idea of being the one to try to help me stop the war. It seemed that his mantra of “Peace, man,” wasn’t simply an idle phrase to him.

I was about to deliver a soliloquy on peace that I was hoping would put Portia’s “The Quality of Mercy” to shame when I had another of those Protectorly impulses that led me to turn back to the Magician. “I would ask leave to put certain questions to the emissary from the dragons.”

The leader gave his permission, and I began to catechize the Magician on the circumstances of the war’s origin and his involvement in its course. Now, any decent lawyer would tell you that you should never ask a witness a question to which you yourself do not know how he will answer, but while I was unaware of the specifics of how he would answer, I was well aware that the Magician would give only the answers that he felt would be the most injurious to my cause, so I had a sneaking suspicion that all I had to do was give him enough rope…

And there it was. “You say that George here was one of these giants involved in that first raid; that he committed numerous acts against the centaurs in that raid; and that he later boasted of this to any of his fellows who would listen?” The crowd around me, which included several centaurs who had been involved with the first raid and knew that all of the giants there had since been killed, was utterly silent as they awaited the Magician’s response, since that was in fact what he had just stated with supreme assurance.

The Magician nodded. “Certainly; I can state this so positively because I was there, having been enjoying the hospitality of one of the centaurs who tragically perished in the raid.”

The murmurs that passed through the centaur mass were low and angry murmurs. A subtle change came over the draconic features when the Magician realized that he had just flat-out lied in front of quite a few centaurs and giants who knew that he was lying. I knew from the way those reptilian eyes played over me that he wanted to blame me for what he’d done, but that would be of no avail in restoring his reputation with either group. In fact, it would weaken him further if the centaurs thought he was so easily manipulated that a child like myself could fool him so.

You see, the one thing both the centaurs and the giants absolutely had in common was a near-worshipful attitude toward the truth…

TO BE CONTINUED


	7. Counterfeiting Peace

Now, discrediting the Magician did not in any way mean that the war automatically came to an end. It actually took many long hours of diplomacy before that happened, but by sacrificing my voice-box for the next few days, I managed to pull it off, sort of.

What did happen more or less automatically was that the dragon embassy (as it were) was promptly expelled, so at least I didn’t have to worry about any of them trying to interject anything into my diplomacy.

The “sort of” with which I modified my “I pulled it off” needs a bit more explaining, so here goes:

George, the camel-centaur and I all got together for a brainstorming session before plunging into the deep diplomatic waters; we managed this because we three were the only ones who knew what the hand blinker code actually translated to, which tended to allow one or another of us to smooth things out between source and recipient, since customs and courtesies varied widely between the giants and the centaurs. Anyway, between the three of us, we came up with something we thought (or more accurately hoped) would be acceptable to all concerned.

Fortunately, another thing the giants and the centaurs had in common was a strong belief in individual action (especially as expressed in a duel), so we basically ended the war by arranging that the two peoples (for lack of a better term) swear indifference to each other; this meant neither group would seek to wipe the other out. On the other hand, anyone who still wanted to go after a vendetta or two was quite free to do so without fear of retaliation from the groups as a whole, but this had to be between individuals.

This paradox of stopping a war by turning it into potentially dozens of duels was actually accepted by both the giants and the centaurs almost without hesitation, which felt really weird; I got the impression that both leaders had been looking for an excuse to end the war in such a way that wouldn’t mean dishonor for themselves or their peoples. Of course, the ideal would have been to stop the violence altogether and eternally, but that was never in the cards. Those who chase after such ideals when a smaller but infinitely more durable solution is right in front of them are as foolish as those who would try to buy their way to peace through selling others up the river; you cannot ride that tiger indefinitely.

Well, reducing the violence from a war between two nations to a series of individual vengeance killings that would hopefully peter out after a few years was as much of a victory as I was going to get, so I took it, and I’d do it again if I had to. As the camel-centaur said by way of farewell, “Peace, man. Peace.”

After an incredibly long Rite of Departure with Well-Wishing, I made my way out of the camp and determinedly started up the nearest green hillside, expecting to see the Realm as soon as I hit its crest. I didn’t, but that didn’t stop me from starting up the slope of the hill behind it with almost as much determination as that with which I’d climbed the first one (though not quite as much wind).

I hadn’t even set foot in the Realm this time around, but I hadn’t needed to do so in order to save it; there was probably something profound in there, but I’ll analyze it later; it’ll be a good thing to stew over the next time that the Coin won’t take me across the gulf of worlds.

Speaking of which, I had barely gone out of sight of the centaurs’ encampment when the silvery swirl surrounded me…

TO BE CONTINUED


	8. Back in the Field

The air-conditioned comfort of the hotel room was quite welcome after my trudge up a couple of hills, though I did have to change clothes again, as the “clean and dry” had gone to “sweaty and soiled” (literally; you can’t slide down a hill without getting soil on your clothes). Fortunately, I had plenty of cotton things into which I could change.

Unfortunately, changing clothes did nothing to help fix my throat; for that, I would probably need a lozenge or twelve, which meant that I would have to leave my room and face my parents with my condition.

My parents do not tend to react well when I get sick; somehow I knew that this time was not going to be the exception to that rule. Certainly my recent bout with walking pneumonia would not increase the chances of their reacting well this time (and water is also wet, in case you weren’t aware).

It also meant going outside my wonderfully air-conditioned room into the incredibly thick hot air that doctors so loved to recommend to work addicts because it would wring you out so fast that you had to rest most of the time. Can you tell that I was rather reluctant to do so?

Before anything else, I tried drinking a bunch of cold water from the small sink in my room; though it helped, there’s only so much water you can drink in any given period without throwing it all back up. Besides, I hate tap water; I could only stand to drink as much as I did because I was terribly thirsty from my recent exertions.

I did finally go out, thinking all kinds of nasty thoughts to myself (because my usual habit of quietly muttering them would have made my throat hurt even worse than it already was), and sought aid for my ailment; telling my parents went about as well (or, rather, as poorly) as I had expected it would.

I love my parents, but there are times when I just flat-out hate them, too.

Getting said aid was actually harder than it might otherwise have been: half the reenactors had laryngitis, so the local medicos were pretty well swamped (ha, ha); this also meant that my own hoarseness was taken as unexceptional, except by my parents, who were infuriated with the group for giving me the bug and with me for succumbing to such a plebeian ailment. I wrote them a note reminding them of a number of famous people who had been so stricken at one point or another, but they’re still steamed (of course, the heat may have something to do with that, too).

Anyway, in the wake of my having to try to stop a war without using so much as a slingshot myself, I found myself wondering about the commissioners at Ghent and how Jackson’s campaigns affected their various efforts to end the war. This was not nearly as simple as you might think: from what I understood of the matter, both sides wanted to work the best possible terms for themselves into the treaty, but the Brits were being particularly sneaky during this period because they were hoping to grab New Orleans, so news of such a setback might have aided the American position.

Trying to sort through complicated and tangled trains of thought like that makes my head hurt more than my throat aches already; I’ll have to look into it further by actually reading a book or two on it if I want to come anywhere close to what happened.

THUS ENDS

Giants & Centaurs & Snares... Oh, My!

Being the Sixth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

THE STORY CONTINUES WITH

Chubby Bunny & Other Games I Hate

Being the Seventh Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion


End file.
